While I agree with a lot of what you are saying especially the vision thing there are a few things where you are IMHO clearly wrong:
1. I think you either overestimate the App market or don't understand Logitech's business. There is no money for Logitech in there at all. While this is pretty good for a single developer like me who sometimes hires a few freelancers, with the cost structure of a company like Logitech you will come out at zero at best. Developing an App like iPeng in such an environment, with similar performance will cost you between $250.000 to $500.000 in a corporate environment (2 developers, a UI designer, a graphics designer, translators) plus customer support. Plus marketing, maybe another $500.0000. Logitech would obviously reach many more customers but even if they are really good and sell ten or 20 or 100 times more than iPeng (the latter would definitely require them to lower the price) this is no money for a company like Logitech. They want to manufacture and manufacturing companies make money by selling hardware. So the logical way to do things would be to give the App away for free and make more money on the HW. Sonos does that, Apple does that. People often talk about how much money Apple makes with the App Store and I tell you: they don't do that and they don't try. It's an enabled for them and they don't want to lose money on it but they don't really care about making a lot. Look at Apple's balance sheet and you'll see that App Store / iTunes profits (they only report them combined) are totally dwarfed by HW sales. 2. I don't believe people want to use a TV to control their music because a TV is a bad UI for that. Not due to bad implementation but principally. People today _believe_ they want that because it's what you can buy because the AV manufacturers do video players and then add some audio because it's in there anyway, but it sucks and always will. People also will never, never seriously use the TV for Internet browsing. Read my words and remember them in 15 years. Visu on a TV, OK, that's cool but how much money is in there for that? There is no A/V market, the use cases are too different, there is an audio market and a video market and the only reason they are often referred to as combined is because video players have an audio output, too do it costs nothing to add that feature. Which is also reflected in the quality that feature usually has on these devices. I don't care whether all of this sounds unamerican to you since I'm not American but these are the lines along which you'll have to align your strategy if you want to get the most money out of it. -- pippin --- see iPeng, the Squeezebox iPhone remote, at penguinlovesmusic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82366 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
